A Closer Look at Aragon’s New Features to Improve Digital Voting Solutions

The platform announced new features and integrated partnerships to enhance digital voting solutions for DAOs and traditional organizations. 

On the May 5 community call, Ferran Reyes, the Digital Marketing & Community Lead at Aragon Labs, and Ramon Canales, the Head of Product at Aragon, hashed out the details of Aragon’s latest features.

The call offered a walkthrough of key functionalities of the new Aragon Voice and Vocdoni voting system, as well as a Q&A. 

Both representatives clarified how the systems work together and what sets them apart from others in the space.

Aragon is a blockchain-based business management platform built on the Ethereum mainnet.

The platform’s primary focus allows creators and managers of organizations to function in a decentralized manner, removing third parties from major operations. It claims to simplify operations while cutting administrative costs.

Organization managers can access Aragon’s business functions such as payroll management, accounting, fundraising, and token distribution.  

Aragon claims to be an interface for the average user, not just those with developer-savvy knowledge. The company hopes to attract businesses working inside and out of the decentralized space. Aragon also supports the development of dApps.

ANT Token 

ANT is Aragon’s native token. In the Aragon ecosystem, ANT holders maintain the collective power of governance. The token plays a major role in the new Aragon Voice feature that is currently in beta.

In February this year, analysts speculated the token would break previous resistance points. A few months later, it broke out to a new all-time high of over $13. This timeline was in the lead up to the beta of Aragon Voice and integration of Vocdoni. 

At the time of writing however, the rate of ANT hovers around $4.83, according to TradingView.

Aragon Voice 

Aragon Voice is the latest development from the Aragon Project. The platform will serve as a proposal and voting system that runs on top of the Vocdoni structure.

It seeks to create a hub for decentralized governance and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

In its own words, Aragon Voice is a “new gasless, permissionless, and universally verifiable voting solution”.

Token holders can create proposals and interact with the community to decide how to delegate tokens. Compatible tokens include the native ANT token, Uniswap (UNI), and DaiStablecoin (DAI).

The platforms present two options for voting, real-time or encrypted results. In real-time, voting results are visible while a proposal is still active.

Token holders can vote and see the votes collected in the lead-up to the official result. On the other hand, encrypted proposals only share results after the proposal has ended.

According to Reyes, the type of proposal will determine the voting process.

The binding proposal goes live to the mainnet. It is more secure, as both the proposal and the results will be in the blockchain and audited by anyone. The other option is the signaling proposal, which will be fully off-chain and incur zero costs.

The two representatives stressed that Aragon Voice empowers people to use their voices. As long as one is a token holder, one can create and vote on proposals.

“Ultimately, Aragon Voice is giving the tool for the community to organize itself and propose ideas they think are important,” said the creators.

While the system is not exclusively for ANT holders, they hope that ANT holders will actively engage with the platform. 

Introducing Vocdoni Solutions

While Aragon Voice focuses on governance for and by token holders within the community space, Vocdoni acts as a pathway for traditional systems to engage with blockchain-based voting solutions.

The word ‘Vocdoni’ comes from the Esperanto language, meaning “to give voice.” Founded in 2018, Vocdoni commits to building a modern, censorship-resistant, flexible, scalable, and anonymous voting system. As of January 2021, it is part of the Aragon project. 

Vocdoni’s voting protocol is what Canales calls “a paradigm shift in digital voting. A universally verifiable, flexible and anonymous voting system, ensuring data availability and an anti-censorship protocol communication”.

However, all projects developed in the Aragon ecosystem can take advantage of the technology. 

Vocdoni leverages decentralized technologies such as Ethereum, xDaichain, Tendermint, IPFS, zero-knowledge proofs, and ERC-20 census protocol.

What sets Vocdoni aside from other players in the DeFi space, like Snapshot, is its universal verifiability and its layer 2 blockchain foundation. Layer 2 technology allows various voting configurations: simple choice, multiple-choice, or quadratic voting.

Equally important, the system allows for voting from conventional organizations and thousands of other projects on and off the blockchain. 

Recently, in the Catalonia region, Vocdoni hosted a survey conducted in parallel with local elections. The State-issued digital certificates and the voters’ identity were anonymized using a cryptographic mechanism that allowed people to vote anonymously.

People were able to authenticate themselves using digital certificates. As a result, Vocdoni aims for any organization, company, or government to use this kind of identification for their users. 

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